You are in a car with a man.
He’s not a man yet, but he acts like it, and he doesn’t have a drivers license yet he’s still driving you.
You don’t have a license either, and he’s a year younger than you. You should have a license but special circumstances say no. You don’t think you can drive without your hands shaking right now, anyway.
The boy is yelling, lecturing you about why it took you ten minutes from texting to get out here and into the car, and you were explaining that you needed to leave a note for your parents in case they wake up and wonder where the hell you’ve gone.
You crumple up the note later, folding it into a minuscule clump once you get back to your house.
He keeps chastising you, like he’s an adult with power who knows better, even though neither of you know what you’re doing or where you’ll go.
Hopefully wherever she is.
You don’t hate him yet. You dislike him, from snide comments he’s made about people you think you like, but that hasn’t blossomed into hatred. That comes when the girl you’re looking for chooses him.
You believe you are an option. You know you’re young and dumb yet you still believe.
She’s somewhere in the city. Drunk, phone dead, sixteen, and you both think she’s pretty, and you both know someone else with worse intentions will, too.
He pulls up to the guard, and he won’t let you out. It’s late, gates to the complex closes at midnight and it’s two hours past that, and he’s trying to explain that someone is in danger when his cellphone rings.
It’s her. Mom’s phone. She got home, and he turns his lecture to her, only now they’re out of concern. "Why did you do that, why didn’t you tell anyone you left, you could have been raped, beaten, passed out and frozen to the sidewalk, run over, worse."
You left because you weren’t having fun. You were tired and your mother was up waiting for you anyway, and you told him that "If anything happened, text me, because I won’t go to bed for a bit.">
You’re glad you stayed up, but you shouldn’t have left in the first place.
She comes up to you Monday after school, and she says thanks for worrying, but you didn’t have to.
You don’t hate her yet, either. You did have to worry, not because of any selfish reason, because someone you know could have been hurt. She has nothing to do with it.
But she has everything to do with it. She’s the only girl (girl, she is a girl, she is shorter and younger and much dumber than you, and it only exemplifies her youth, yet she acts like she is a woman and you pretend she is in the fantasies you make up in your head) that wanted to be that drunk for reasons you know but don’t understand. She’s been through worse. You haven’t.
She’s fine. You aren’t.
You think both of you aren’t, even if she’ll disagree until she dies because of it.
She says it’s cute how you worried about her.
Despite your heart, you don’t smile.